Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile: studies of beauty and "ideal" proportions.

Abstract

L EONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519), the most fascinating figure of the Renaissance, was born onApril15,1452, inthe Tuscan hill town of Vinci, near Florence, Italy.Hewas the illegitimateson of Piero d’Antonio, a Florentine notary, andayoungpeasantwoman,Caterina. Illegitimacy meant he was not permitted to learn Greek or Latin as a child, which forced the young Leonardoto learn to think forhimself and withdraw into a private world of observation and invention. Leonardo’s artistic aptitude appeared relatively early. When he was 15 years old, his father apprenticed him to Andrea del Verrochio, in whose workshop Leonardo received training in painting and sculpture. Leonardo’s genius was dominated by one ruling passion—unquenchable curiosity. Everything he observed made him ask why and how, particularly how. His relentless curiosity was matched by his indefatigable energy in attempting to find answers to his questions. His drawings, sketches, and notes are almost all answers to questions, in particular concerning man as a mechanism, whether in anatomy, physiology or beauty and “ideal” proportions. The Royal Collection is the art collection of the British Royal Family. The works are dispersed between a number of locations, but the nearly 600 drawings, arguably the finest collection of Leonardo drawings in the world, are housed in The Royal Library at Windsor Castle, Windsor, England, the largest inhabited castle in the world. This great miscellaneous collection contains drawings and textual notes by Leonardo. It was created by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who purchased in Milan a large quantity of Leonardo’s manuscripts, which he took to Spain in 1590. The volume in The Royal Collection was bound in red leather and bore the gilt characters, “Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci restored by Pompeo Leoni.” Unfortunately, Leoni’s destructive “restoration” involved cutting out parts of the original manuscripts and redistributing and reassembling the fragments. A modern restoration was begun in the late 19th century and completed in 1994, separating the volume into loose folios, each placed between 2 sheets of Perspex (Plexiglas). The folios have been divided into 5 thematic sections: anatomy; landscapes, plants, and water studies; horses and other animals; figure studies; and miscellaneous papers. The fourth section of The Royal Collection includes the Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile (Figure). It is thought to have been bequeathed to Francesco Melzi, from whose heirs itwaspurchasedbyPompeoLeoni(ca 1582-90). Thomas Howard, Second Earl of Arundel, obtained it in 1630. After the defeat of his father, Charles II (1630-1685) spent his 20s mostly in exile on the continent, which no doubt added to his love of art. On his return to England at the Restoration in 1660, King Charles acquired the volumes containing the 600 drawings by Leonardo and 80 drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger. Leonardo executed several portrait paintings during his career, yet this profile of a young woman has been drawn with great temperance. It is not known whether this beautiful drawing was a preliminary study intended for a portrait now lost or a finished work in its own right. The image does not resemble the idealized images of women or the typical Madonna-like heads, which resonate throughout a number of Leonardo’s paintings, such as St Anne and the Virgin (Louvre, Paris, France), epitomizing the eternal feminine ideal. Therefore, it is likely to have been a portrait drawn directly from life. There is a remarkably wide range of handling of the metalpoint, from the free sweeping outlines of the bust and flowing layers of loose hair to the very restrained expression of the face. The hair is beautifully caught with Leonardo’s flowing lines. Leonardo has carefully revealed enough of the hairstyle and bust to render a clear idea of the intended final impression but concentrated most of his efforts on the essential qualities of the facial profile and just a little section of the hair displayed nearest the face. The balanced tonal marks provide a conspicuous impression of the fullness of the cheek and neck, and help to exhibit the veil over the back of the head. Interestingly, Jacques Joseph (1865-1934), one of the pioneers of modern rhinoplasty, used a drawing of this portrait to describe the nasofacial angle, which he termed the “profile angle.” As with the Mona Lisa, this profile image has sometimes been used in an attempt to demonstrate Leonardo’s supposed use of the “golden proportion” and other so-called ideal relationships in defining facial proportions. This approach is simply baseless. Although there has been some debate as to the identity of the sitter, it is known that the Mona Lisa is a portrait (ie, a painting of a person), now generally accepted to be a pregnant Madonna Elisabetta, third wife of Francesco del Giocondo, not an idealized image. As such, the facial proportions are not expected to be “ideal.” Leonardo illustrated a number of figures for the mathematician Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione (On Divine Proportion), which explains the common misconception that Leonardo also used the golden proportion in his own proportional studies. However, contrary to this popular belief, Leonardo’s studies on human proportional